back to article Would you blow $5.6m to own a dot-word? Meet a bloke who did just that

A further $13m was spent yesterday on auctions for the ownership rights to three new soul-sapping dot-word domains: .spot, .salon and .realty. Amazon outbid Google and gTLD powerhouse Donuts to pay $2.2m for the rights to sell dot-spot addresses; Donuts beat L'Oreal and two others for dot-salon at $5.1m; and top of the heap, …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    $2.2 million

    Hey, it's only half a percent of Amazon's losses.

    1. Cliff

      Re: $2.2 million

      .mug

      That's all.

  2. LaeMing
    FAIL

    Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!

    1. Cliff

      outdamnd.

  3. Mark 85

    Hmm... dot-spot...

    my-dog.spot ... nope

    carpet.spot .... nope

    black.spot .... nope

    x-marks-the.spot ... nope

    g.spot ...aha.... the money shot... p0rn!!!!

    1. Captain DaFt

      Re: Hmm... dot-spot...

      How about sell.spot? Or smoke.spot? For all your stoner needs!

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. Ken Y-N
    Coat

    A .realty terrible waste of money

    https://ill-get-my.coat

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

      Re: A .realty terrible waste of money

      I was even more confused. I persistently read the word as reality - probably because I don't use the US term realtor. And I was trying to work out who'd pay for a .reality address. God? Stephen Hawking?

      I got an email this week offering our company the prime opportunity to register yet another version of our addresses. In this case it was .xyz - which is apparently for those who don't want to be tied down by being an org, a me, a com or any of the other myriad options.

      I wonder how much I'd have to pay to become registrar for .bugger-off! And how many people I could get to register with me?

      1. Nuke
        Thumb Up

        Re: A .realty terrible waste of money

        "I got an email this week offering our company the prime opportunity to register yet another version of our addresses. In this case it was .xyz"

        Same here. Seems like the whole thing is for the registrars to sell you more domain names because you "need" to defend your name.

        Seems to me that the whole TLD thing is redundant. What follows the dot was already devalued before this new round of nonsense even began. Except possibly .ac and .gov it has long been meaningless and now even less by another order of magnitude.

        1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

          Re: A .realty terrible waste of money

          I wouldn't quite say meaningless. I still look down on companies that have a .co at the end of their names. Unless they genuinely are Colombian of course. We specifically wanted a .co.uk because we're a small player, trying to look bigger, in an industry full of small companies with the rather obvious .biz at the end of their names.

          But I guess you're right. When everyone searches for companies on Google, they just click the first link. And despite my best efforts, never look at what they clicked on first to see where they're going. Also I've told my Mum how to get to www.bbc.co.uk, but still found her typing it into Google's search box.

          Definition: The Address Bar - archaic term - What your Grandad looked at, when he wanted to avoid all his money being stolen by Nigerian fraudsters.

          The only time people might notice is when being given email addresses. I'm constantly surprised by the number of decent sized companies I talk to, where people have @btconnect.com after their names.

  6. werdsmith Silver badge

    I predict the simple original .com is going to be like the short private car reg plates one day.

    It's amazing how just adding a word to DNS can be such a cash generator. It really has nothing substantial behind it, it's just a kind of currency.

  7. Ben 50

    A two to five year ROI?

    ...and people are complaining about that?!?!?

    1. Pen-y-gors

      Re: A two to five year ROI?

      only IF they get 50,000 idiots to sign up to each one. And that's a VERY big if...

      1. tony2heads

        @Pen-y-gors

        Sadly idiots are plentiful; idiots with that sort of cash to throw around less so.

        I still think it is a crap business model.

    2. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

      Re: A two to five year ROI?

      Ben 50,

      That's not the ROI though. $50 x 50,000 = $2.5m. So that pays for your domain. Now you need some servers, some staff, an office, perhaps a call centre. Then you have to add in the cost of your capital, which you could probably get 5% sticking into corporate bonds. Or of course, you may have to borrow it, in which case it's costing you 5% + the opportunity cost of not investing it in something else.

      I suspect that's one reason why it's not worth buying just one. There's a large risk of having zero registrants. Remeber .tel? Nobody else does.

      However if you've registered a few tens/hundreds of these, and some pay off, then it's only one lot of infrastructure to run them. After all, the ones that fail will put almost no load on your system, as you watch your initial investment evaporate away.

  8. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    WTF?

    And just what is wrong with

    .com, or .co.uk (other countries are available)?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And just what is wrong with

      They're full of names that are just 'buy-this-domain' pages.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And just what is wrong with

      They've basically thrown the whole point of TLDs right out the window by fragmenting the DNS hierarchy like this. This is nothing more than a massive money making scheme by ICANN, in the same way as subdividing and auctioning radio spectrum is to the UK Government.

      What a crock.

      If the DNS system no longer needs to be hierarchical, what WTF do we need dot-anything any more(*)? Oh thats right, because some clever dick at ICANN realised they could rake in stupid amounts of money by conning the market into bidding $BIG$ for each word in the English language ... and beyond probably, by the time they get done milking this particular cash cow.

  9. Stefan 6
    Paris Hilton

    What a tosspot.

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Happy

      That's .tosspot to you...

      1. dotdavid

        tos.spot shurely?

  10. Frankee Llonnygog

    How do you make a small fortune?

    Invest a large fortune in a gTLD

  11. MJI Silver badge

    Weird

    .spot - OK for acne treatments I suppose

    .reality - wierd, anyway wouldn't they be better off with Tuvalu domains for their reality shows.

    1. Mage Silver badge

      Re: Weird Reality

      An Estate Agent in USA is a Realtor. In Ireland an Auctioneer, possibly because in 19th C. an "Estate Agent" was a rent collector for Absentee Landlords.

      .Reality is for reselling to USA Estate Agents

      Yes, I agree it's daft, I have no idea why USA Estate Agents are Realtors

      see www.realtor.com

      1. MJI Silver badge

        Re: Weird Reality

        They have some strange names for property shops.

        I hope this stupid domains crash and burn

      2. Captain DaFt

        Re: Weird Reality

        "Yes, I agree it's daft, I have no idea why USA Estate Agents are Realtors"

        It describes the average person's anus after having to deal with one.

      3. Mark 85

        Re: Weird Reality

        Realtors deal in Real Estate in the States. I suppose there's a Not Real Estate or maybe a Fictional Real Estate. The term has always made wonder. I guess it's time for me to learn something....

        Hmm... per the 'Net... first used in 1666. It's a legal term used in used in jurisdictions such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Nigeria, Australia, and New Zealand.

        But nothing is telling me 'why' it's called that other than the legal "real property" vs. "personal property".

  12. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Holmes

    Spot

    Used in several European languages to mean advertisement on television or radio.

    Case closed, Watson.

  13. Graham Marsden
    Thumb Down

    What about....

    .gullible

    .moneymaking

    .scam

    .suckers

  14. Dr_N

    How much for .dot ?

    dot.dot.dot

    1. Swarthy
      Go

      Re: How much for .dot ?

      If you want to get.dot, you should also invest in .dash: dot.dash.dot.dash

      1. Paul Wells

        Re: How much for .dot ?

        wire.dash

  15. Nigel 11

    Vanity

    If you want to part someone from a large sum of money, exploiting their vanity is a good way to do it.

    I have yet to meet anyone who cares if a site is .com .co.uk .us .tv or anything more exotic. In most cases it is hidden inside an anchor tag, and they see some other phrase which they click on. Or they just type "amaz" (Amazon) or "lewis" (John Lewis) or "there" (for theregister) into their browser, and it finds the rest for you in an instant. Or they Google.

    Isn't the main purpose of the DNS to insert a level of indirection, so traffic can be transparently diverted from one IP address to another. If the original design had been virtual and physical numerical IP addresses in a much bigger number-space than four billion (maybe 64 bits), would anyone have bothered inventing a DNS? They haven't invented one for telephone numbers and nobody seems to care. We just cache the useful ones locally and "Google" or "link" to the others.

    1. Trigonoceps occipitalis

      Re: Vanity

      I find google.com and google.co.uk are different.

      google.spot anyone.

  16. caffeine addict

    Shame they haven't released .gb - it would have been nice to get our "proper" tld back up and running.

  17. batfastad

    Money

    "Amazon outbid Google and gTLD powerhouse Donuts to pay $2.2m for the rights to sell dot-spot addresses"

    Rights to sell? Or rights to stop anyone else selling?

    Why? No idea. Maybe just to annoy Google by setting up .blog.spot

    But I wonder what proportion of these extra TLDs will ever be publicly available. Donuts seem to sell alot of theirs but as a private company setup solely to do this, it makes sense. In order to apply for one of these you should have to make registrations publicly available within a year, that would stop big corporates from polluting the internet with .canon .google .sony etc.

    So what happens to all the money ICANN are presumably grabbing from this? Filling a US.gov budget defecit no doubt, before ICANN is spun off to "neutral" ownership.

  18. Crazy Operations Guy

    I've blocked every TLD longer than 3 characters, nothing of value has been lost

    Some years ago, I blocked any DNS request for any name where the last component is longer than three characters (Was originally intended to prevent single-label names from getting outside my network) but now its blocking all this stupid gTLD bollocks (Also blocks .info, but was there anything worthwhile in there anyway?)

  19. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    Devil

    But, nobody uses URLs any more!

    "Just search for us on Facebook!"

    1. Captain DaFt

      Re: But, nobody uses URLs any more!

      You forgot "Follow us on Twitter!"

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